How to Find an English Speaking Partner

hey everybody welcome to another video with me chris amerikos and in this video i'm going to tell you how you can find a speaking partner to practice english with it doesn't matter where you're located in the world and it doesn't matter what your level of english is right now i'm going to tell you how you can find the right speaking partner so that you can get speaking practice and you can improve your english let's go [Music] right first of all let's talk about what a speaking partner really is because a lot of people are confused about that sometimes people come to me and they say kris i need to practice my english and i need to practice it with you because you're a native speaker that doesn't really make sense to me because speaking practice is just about practicing speaking and it doesn't matter who you're practicing with but if you are practicing with a native speaker or a non-native speaker there are some different strategies that you can use to improve your english the most in the shortest period of time so first of all let's talk about speaking practice with native speakers if you are a non-native speaker which means that english is not your first language and you're practicing speaking with native speakers maybe you're in a classroom maybe you're practicing online maybe you just travel and you meet people and that's how you practice right any of those methods are fine but what you need to remember is that when you're practicing with a native speaker it might be a little more difficult for you usually we can understand people who have a similar accent or come from a similar place to ourselves so if you're from thailand then it might be easier for you to understand other people from thailand they all speak with a thai accent and then when you meet someone from the united kingdom from the uk their accent is different and it's harder for you to understand them that's completely natural and that happens all the time and you don't have to worry just you need to know some strategies for how to deal with the situation so what usually happens is when i see non-native speakers and native speakers interacting and non-native speakers think of it like speaking practice well what happens is usually they don't listen to the native speaker 100 they're thinking and they're trying to understand and they're trying to decide what some of these words mean they're trying to understand this new type of pronunciation that they hear and they can really get slowed down and what we need to do when we're trying to understand a native speaker of another language is we need to slow ourselves down we're thinking too fast we're thinking about too many things we need to slow down we need to listen one of the biggest problems with speaking that i found in my students from all over the world and we have 24 7 speaking practice with native speakers on my website chrisamariocoast.com so one thing that i've noticed is that a lot of non-native speakers they don't listen to the whole sentence or they don't listen to what the native speakers say and then think about why they said it so we need to think about why that's the second strategy and why requires a little more listening first of all when you're speaking to the native speaker the native speaker will do a couple different things usually a native speaker will use active listening active listening is when a person is talking to us and we say yeah okay i hear you okay go on yeah oh wow great right so they're not just listening if you speak to someone and they just look at you with a flat expression then it doesn't help you understand if they understand you right you might never know if the person really understood you and that's a problem so you want to listen and you want to understand why they're saying these things they're not saying these things because they want to stop you from talking some native speakers they use very active listening they say these things all the time and what happens is a lot of non-native speakers might feel that they were interrupted that the native speaker wants to start talking that's not what's happening they're just showing you that they hear you now another thing that a lot of native speakers do is a lot of native speakers will repeat what you said to you right and they don't do this just because they like repeating it they're usually doing this because you made a mistake it's not polite for native english speakers to correct other english speakers speech it's just not not polite it's not the right thing to do in our culture so that's why usually when you meet a native speaker especially one who's not a teacher they don't want to correct you they're not going to say oh that's wrong you should say it this way right they're not going to do that to you what they will do is they will repeat what you said back to you and they will say it the correct way now native speakers who who do this they're actually trying to help you and that's great so as a non-native speaker what you should do is you should listen for that that if they're repeating it back to you but if they changed something what you want to do is not just continue talking you want to repeat the correct way this will make the native speaker feel that you listened to their correction you understood why they repeated what you said and it will help you learn and remember better because now it actually came out of your mouth so this is a really really good strategy and i see a lot of people ignoring this and not using it when they're practicing with native speakers and it's it's sad because it's so easy right so let's let me give you an example let's say that juan comes to me and starts talking he says chris i like videos your well that's wrong right we should say i like your videos so me native speaker talking to juan i hear him make this mistake and i say to him oh you like my videos thank you so i didn't repeat exactly the words he said i didn't say i like your videos right that's what a teacher might do a teacher might show you and underline which word needs to be changed they might tell you that it's a mistake but native speakers who aren't teachers usually don't do that because it's rude it's not polite in our culture so instead they will say it back to you from their point of view right so again juan says i like videos your and i say oh you like my videos thank you and the conversation can continue or juan can be can do it the useful way and he can repeat it back again he can say yes i like your videos and then me native speaker chris says great yes that's right right so so you need to think about it like that that native speakers can actively listen to you and they show you that by saying small words to let you know that they're listening and they understand native speakers also will repeat things back to you and that's their way of correcting your mistakes now what if you're not practicing with a native speaker is it useful my answer is absolutely in fact most people in this world are non-native speakers so it's going to be hard for you to always find a native speaker to practice with and in the end why do you need to practice with a native speaker at all well a lot of people believe that practicing with native speakers happens faster because they don't have to think so much about what they say they think that it's more natural because again they don't have to think about it they just say it but really you want to find a native speaker who's a teacher if you think that it's important to find a native speaker but you can practice with non-native speakers too and practicing with non-native speakers is actually a great great great strategy that a lot of people don't understand because non-native speakers use a more general type of english they don't use so much slang they don't use so many idioms and collocations and all of those things are just different ways for me to say that native speakers have their special little language and it depends which country they're from so understand this me native speaker from the united states if i go to australia or if i go to ireland i will not understand a lot of the slang and idioms that people use yeah i speak english i'm a native speaker but i won't understand that because it's different in different countries and that's why it's much better to practice with non-native speakers than to practice with native speakers in many cases so the perfect balance here is to practice with both non-native and native speakers to not see the difference right instead we should see oh i practiced with a person from india i practiced with a person from sri lanka practice with a person from italy from france from brazil from argentina from mexico from indonesia right it doesn't matter and native speakers are the same way instead of just saying native speaker there's lots of different types of native speakers and they sound different and they use different words and phrases so if you're practicing with a person from new zealand they're going to sound different than a person from canada and you'll need to understand that when we're speaking english and understanding english in the world we should try to understand all of these things so we need to understand some basic general english that's where you should practice speaking english with your speaking partner right you shouldn't focus so much on slang and idioms that's only important if you're gonna go live in that country if you don't live in that country then it's only important if you listen to the music or watch the films from that country right it's about that country it's about that region of the country sometimes people in new york speak differently than people in california so it's really important when we look for english speaking practice that we understand which practice we're actually looking for that we understand why we're looking for this kind of practice and what we want to get out of it so before you go into any speaking practice situation you should set a goal for yourself understand what you want to achieve by practicing speaking with this person or this group of people now if you want to join speaking practice lessons we have 30 lessons every day so 24 7 you can join a speaking practice lesson and practice with people from around the world and you can practice with professional teachers who are also native speakers so we have both options for you the link is under this video somewhere or you can go over to my my website chrisamericos.com e e the letter e two times and you can see our speaking our speaking program you can join and you can start speaking immediately because we have lessons around the clock uh it's every day and there's no breaks you can always always know that anytime that you need speaking practice you can go there now speaking practice and finding a speaking partner is one of the most difficult parts of learning english i've heard it from so many students they all tell me chris i can go on the internet i can watch videos on youtube or facebook and i can learn grammar i can do grammar exercises on different websites for free i can learn vocabulary i can learn all of these things but there's no one for me to practice speaking with and there's no one who will correct my mistakes so that's why it's good to have speaking practice with a professional teacher a professional teacher should be able to correct your mistakes tell you why you're wrong tell you about the rule that you broke right because if we're wrong it's not just because somebody's a native speaker and they said that we're wrong it's not just because in america people don't speak like that no that's not that's not how it works in languages languages have rules so a good teacher should be able to tell you which rule you broke to make that mistake and once you learn more and more of those rules then you'll be able to remember when you're speaking that oh i made that mistake before and there was a rule about it right it helps us to make a note and then implement that to add that into reality when we speak in the future with someone now the last thing i want to tell you about finding a speaking partner is where you look for speaking partners because there are different kinds of people who are looking for different things right there are apps on the phone that you can download and you can join and you can just find a random person in the world and connect with them and start speaking that's pretty cool but it's not always the best idea to just find a new random person every time because your speaking practice will always be the same it will always be the first meeting speaking practice right what you need to do is you need to find someone or some group of people who are committed to speaking practice and they will stay with you for days weeks months right that way you can develop a relationship with them doesn't have to be a real relationship it's just a language practice relationship so for example in my program english every day where we have 24 7 speaking practice we do exactly that we develop a kind of relationship with the students who join and what we do is we try to take them from that first step in a relationship when you just meet someone and you say hello nice to meet you sir and all of these very polite very proper things and we want to move them to the informal type of conversations that people usually have it's more natural to speak informally because we have more informal situations in our lives than formal situations so that's why we want to just focus on finding partners who are committed committed means that they have promised to do it that they will not give up but they will continue and when you find a committed speaking partner that person can really help you improve your english and you can help them you probably haven't thought about it from that perspective before you probably haven't thought about it that way but when you think about it you are really helping someone else practice their english you are a kind of teacher and what you're doing when you go and have speaking practice with someone regularly is you are improving them and that's really the most important thing that you can do is help someone else if you learn one word you can teach a person who knows zero words and that's exactly why when you have speaking practice with someone you should not just think of it as how am i going to learn more english for me you should think of it as how am i going to learn more english so that i can help more people you see you become a carrier of the language so once you pick this language up now you carry it around with you and you can give it to other people so i hope that this video helped you understand a little bit more about finding a speaking partner and i hope that you understand that we have a really good option for you 24 7 speaking practice just click the link under this video i hope you liked this video and if you did go ahead and press like press subscribe click that bell button so you get notified when i release new videos and leave a comment down below let me know what else you would like to learn about thanks for watching i'll see you in the next video bye bye

Channel: English With Kris Amerikos

Views: 12,144

Keywords: partner english, english speaking partner, english partner for speaking, how to find native english speakers, learn English, practice English, Kris Amerikos, talk to foreigners online, app for english speaking partner

Id: iHRcIPc6phU

Length: 16min 53sec (1013 seconds)

Published: Sun May 23 2021